Canadian Red Cross staff who were in Thompson during National Volunteer Week from April 15-21 said the organization already has an amazing group of volunteers in the Nickel City but that they’re looking to add more.
“We really want to recognize our volunteers right now,” said Alison Everitt, the Manitoba Red Cross capacity building officer for disaster management. “They do so much for us. We have volunteers who have been with us a for a couple weeks and then we’ve got volunteers for 40 years who stick around so they really love what they do. They love working together, they love helping people and I think we just really want to celebrate that during this week.”
Red Cross volunteers in Thompson include eight members of the Personal Disaster Assistance (PDA) teams, who are deployed in situations such as when someone loses their home to a fire, says Cailin Hodder, the Red Cross’s senior manager of disaster management for Manitoba and Nunavut.
“Their goal is to go out and provide supports on, ‘OK, what are the next steps? What do i have to do? I’ve just lost everything,’ and they’ll also provide, if needed, food, clothing and lodging for 72 hours,” says Hodder.
There are currently nine such teams in the province and the Red Cross wants to build that up to 10 or 12 teams province-wide because smaller communities don’t necessarily have many resources to assist people affected by tragedies such as fires.
“Some larger city centres will develop a plan or strategy to help those that are impacted but then some communities we do see a gap,” Hodder says.
The goal in Thompson is to grow the number of Red Cross volunteers by 20 members to increase local capacity to deal with not only small-scale disasters but also larger events, such as wildfires near Red Sucker Lake and in the Island Lake area last summer, which prompted a response in Thompson
“Our Thompson team opened a registration centre, they registered evacuees [from Red Sucker Lake], they gave them food, they gave them water and put them on planes and sent them to Winnipeg so it was kind of a staging team,” Hodder said.
Nearly 50 hemodialysis patients from the Island Lake area were in the city last summer for a few weeks.
“The volunteers came out and they would work a shift and help out with all of those needs, making sure that they had a hotel room, again food and clothing and all those basic needs,” said Hodder. They also organized activities to help make the time the evacuees spent away from home more enjoyable.
“Our volunteers set up a full day out to Pisew Falls on a bus. They went and threw a little bit of a bowling party. The evacuees in return actually threw our volunteers a party,” Hodder said. “It’s great to be able to provide them an outlet and activities and resources to say, ‘Go out and try this.’”
All kinds of people are welcome to join the Red Cross as volunteers, says Thompson-based community outreach co-ordinator Jessie Horodecki.
“We need to get the young people involved for sure but the more - young, retired, older, it doesn’t matter. We want everybody because they all do certain things differently but they all champion what they do and they do amazing jobs.”
Potential volunteers must be 18 or older and complete a screening process, which includes an application and an interview, as well as completion of criminal record and vulnerable sector checks, both of which are paid for by the Red Cross.
“There’s no cost to volunteers,” Hodder says.
To learn more or to begin the process, anyone interested can go to www.redcross.ca/heroeswantedmb or call 204-982-7330.
“Recognizing our volunteers, I mean they really, truly are heroes,” Hodder says.
